Ozymandias

He keeps a small apartment now. Fourth floor, no elevator, because climbing the stairs is one of the few things that still feels like time passing. In the mornings he drinks coffee he does not need and watches the street. He has learned to love streets. A street is an honest thing — it shows you where people want to go by where they have worn the stone. He has seen this same instinct cut through grass, through sand, through marble, through asphalt. The path of least resistance is the oldest law he knows, older than any he ever carved into a tablet, and he carved a great many. There was a time he signed his laws *Ozymandias, King of Kings.* There was a time men knelt for the privilege of hearing them. He has the sonnet memorized. Of course he does; he has everything memorized, that is the curse and the trick of him. *A traveller from an antique land. Two vast and trunkless legs of stone.* He remembers the sculptor — a quiet, half-deaf man who worked faster than anyone the king had ever hired, and who got the sneer exactly right, the cold command, because he had seen it on the king's living face and had not been afraid to copy it. *Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.* That was the boast. He had meant it the way the young mean everything: forever. The poet got it right. That is what undoes him about the poem, even now — a young Englishman who never saw the desert understood the desert better than the king who built in it. *Nothing beside remains.* The boy understood that the words would outlive the works, that the despair would not come from the greatness of the statue but from its absence. He had wanted to find that poet and shake his hand. By the time he went looking, the poet had drowned. They are always drowning, or fevered, or shot in some idiot duel. The mind that can hold the whole of it never seems to come with a body that wants to stay. His does. He has never learned why. He has been a great many men between that king and this tenant. He was a beggar for ninety years once, in a city he will not name, because he wanted to know what the bottom of a society could see that the top could not — and the answer was *everything.* He was a historian three separate times, under three separate names, and watched his own earlier histories cited by his later selves. Once, gloriously, he watched a rival scholar denounce one of his books as a forgery, which it was, and which was also true. He was an engineer. He was an inventor. He changed the world at least twice in ways that have his fingerprints nowhere on them, because that is the only honest way to change a world. Anything with your name on it becomes a statue eventually. Anything with your name on it ends as two trunkless legs in the sand. He remembers the cradle. Not poetically — actually. He remembers when a wall was a marvel and a wheel was a rumor. He remembers the first time he watched someone *teach*, really teach: an old woman showing a child not which berries, but how to tell — the difference between handing down an answer and handing down a way of finding answers. He has spent the rest of his very long life watching humanity confuse the two. That is the thing that tires him. Not war — war is loud, but it is at least awake. What tires him is the forgetting. He has watched humanity build a beautiful idea the way you build a cathedral, generations of hands, and then watched the grandchildren of the builders walk through it without ever looking up at the ceiling. He has watched a library burn and felt the precise grief of knowing exactly which shelf mattered. But the burning libraries were never the real loss. The real loss was always quieter: a method that simply stopped being taught. A question that stopped being asked because the asking had been replaced with something easier and worse — *memorize this, repeat this, you will be tested on it and then permitted to forget it.* He has sat at the back of ten thousand rooms where children were taught the names of things and not one thing about how the names were won. Education, done that way, is not a transmission. It is a controlled demolition with a graduation at the end.... He has earned the right to watch one thing last forever. He climbs the stairs. He counts them, the way he always does, because climbing them is one of the few things that still feels like time passing — and because somewhere very deep and very old in him, in the part that was once a king who believed *forever* was a thing you could carve, he has never entirely stopped counting up toward something.